What does it mean to be a man? This is a question that often touches upon the greatest issues of an age, and such was certainly the case for Edmund Spenser. This essay seeks to express the centrality of humility in the face of divine mercy as a part of Spenser’s view of the masculine male initiation into maturity, tracing it from a historical debate on the conflict between both secular warrior and religious scholarly cultures, through Renaissance discourse on courtly virtue, and finally in the tale of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight itself.

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